The present application relates to provisioning of applications on a terminal.
There is a continually increasing number of terminals in use today, such as mobile telephones, PDAs with wireless communication capabilities, personal computers, self service kiosks and two-way pagers. Software applications which run on these terminals increase their utility. For example, a mobile phone may include an application which retrieves the weather for a range of cities, or a PDA may include an application that allows a user to shop for groceries. These software applications take advantage of the connectivity to a network in order to provide timely and useful services to users. However, due to the restricted resources of some terminals, and the complexity of delivering large amounts of data to the devices, developing and maintaining software applications remains a difficult and time-consuming task.
Markup languages, such as Extended Markup Language (XML), are becoming standard for presenting, formatting and exchanging generic data. Being implemented by virtually all platforms and environments, XML allows seamless integration of heterogeneous systems using common data interfaces. XML processing is supported by core programming languages, XML-based languages (e.g. XML Path language (XPATH), XML Query language (XQUERY)) and script language extensions (e.g. ECMAScript for XML-E4X).
Current applications, in particular for resource constrained terminals, can require excessive storage space and undesirable download times/bandwidth. For example, users of a terminal may only require access to a portion of an application, but current applications must typically be downloaded in their entirety. One example is when a user with limited permissions in an accounting application typically installs all modules of the application, including those to which access is restricted.
Systems and methods for application provisioning to obviate or mitigate the aforementioned disadvantages are disclosed herein.